HOUSTON — Harris County officials are pushing back on releasing the voting records of noncitizens, arguing in a recent court filing that those records should not be made public, even though federal law states they should be.

The Indianapolis-based Public Interest Legal Foundation, which investigates voter integrity issues across the county, has been fighting for months to see those records and county attorneys have consistently fought back.

“Harris County is fully committed to concealing the extent of noncitizen registration and voting,” said Logan Churchwell, a spokesman for the Public Interest Legal Foundation. “Never before has this foundation seen a greater commitment to hiding public records readily available in other counties. The data in question could help identify procedural failures that place immigrants at risk of premature access to voting and convert their naturalization paths to deportation orders.”

The Harris County Voter Registrar argued on June 1 that “the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) does not require public disclosure of the category of documents the Public Interest Legal Foundation seeks.”

The NVRA protects registered voters from improper removal from the rolls and places limited requirements on states to remove ineligible voters from the rolls. Once a person is officially registered to vote, a state may only remove them from the voting list if: the person dies, changes residence, asks to be removed from the list, or becomes ineligible under state law because of criminal conviction or mental incapacity.

The law, they argued, “does not create any obligation for a state to conduct a list maintenance program to remove the names of voters who may be ineligible due to lack of citizenship.”

Harris County is also arguing that the National Voter Registration Act is not intended to serve as a tool to investigate alleged voter fraud. County officials also said that public disclosure of these records “would disservice the public interest.”

The foundation disagrees, and adds that these types of requests in other states revealed serious defects in election integrity procedures, the foundation said.

In April 2015, the foundation filed a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of a client detailing 13 cases where individuals admitted to not being citizens or refused to declare a status at all when applying for voting, yet were registered anyway.

The brief highlighted testimony from the Harris County voter registrar’s office from 2006 stating that noncitizen voting “has and will continue to occur.”

And In May 2015, the Harris County Voter Registrar testified before the Texas House Elections Committee that “thousands” of noncitizens were discovered in the voter registration system annually and were regularly handed over to the District Attorney for prosecution, according to the foundation.

The foundation began asking for records from Harris and other Texas counties in 2017.

Founded in 2012, the foundation is a nonprofit public interest law firm dedicated to election integrity, according to its website.

Trent is an award-winning editor and reporter, who has previously worked The Denver Post, The (Nashville) Tennessean, and the San Diego Union-Tribune. Most recently, he was the investigative producer for Houston’s KTRK-TV ABC-13. He was also the editor and founder of Texas Watchdog, a ground-breaking news group that paved the way for this project. Trent is a teacher of journalism skills, and has shown hundreds of reporters and citizen-journalists how to use public records, databases and journalism tools to keep a watchful eye on their own local government.

Houston is one of the most politically corrupt city in the United States…I don’t suspect that illegals are actually voting, but they ALL are issued a voters registration automatically when they apply for their driver’s license, corruption then steps in and cast votes for them. The fed’s need to make an example out of our elected officials!

Illegals should never be able to vote until they become citizens and if they voted it needs to be released to public they have no rights in this instance it’s called breaking the law. By the way for the second time crossing illegally was first time they broke our laws.

We have bigggg problems in Houton. Who & why is the Buffalo Bayou being “whacked”? Our bayous are historical yet Buffalo Bayou is being destroyed. Is it because it will allow more building of condos and mansions? Who will profit? Who is “giving the stamp of approval”? Accountability is not
transparent…..Save Buffalo Bayou….(see fb).